First gig of our Sweater Pehno Tour is an Action Replay Concert where we play for a school in Ranipet Tamil Nadu
There is something great about being a young child. You don’t approach music with the burden of how good it has to be before you decide to give yourself to it. You decide to give in to music much more easily than when you grow up steeped in opinions of what music is cool and what is uncool.
Sometimes I wish I was 15 again, waiting in a queue of sorts to be allowed to borrow the latest tape (in my hometown of Trivandrum, it was usually the latest Batman OST, or the new movie with AR Rahman’s music), take it home and listen to it for exactly one day before I would have to return it to the owner to be borrowed, also for a day, by the next guy in line. It was so easy to love new music then.
We rediscovered this love when we played for the kids of Vedavalli High School, Walajapet, not far from Vellore in Tamil Nadu on the first gig of the Sweater Pehno Tour. We played 2 sets, on a home-made PA system, to a rapturous audience who loved our music with all their hearts. I’m pretty sure that we’re the first real band that these kids have heard. What I’m also kicked about is that we’re definitely the first of many bands these kids will listen to. We played two sets, one for the middle school and the other for the high school, each ending in raucous, rambunctious celebratory dancing.
After signing several autographs on exercise books (alongside math and science lessons) with fountain pens, I was left with just one thought: music tends to take you places you’d never have gone otherwise.
*Swarathma performed an Action Replay show at Vedavalli High School, Walajapet, TN. Action Replay is a series of not-for-profit shows that Swarathma plays for audiences who would otherwise probably never hear them play.
Photocredit: Sumukh Bharadwaj